This is going to sound really awful, but I've had Ultima III "carbonized" and OS X native for the last two years, but haven't spent the time to polish off the rough edges in order to release it to the general public.

After I get MPFreaker out of 'beta' status, I'll do something about this silly situation.

This is great news! I, for one, am psyched. Now, if I can only find my Ultima III key again... Seriously, I'd buy another key, if I had to, to be able to play again in OS X. Will there be any other tweaks other than Carbonization?

spinavision wrote:This is great news! I, for one, am psyched. Now, if I can only find my Ultima III key again... Seriously, I'd buy another key, if I had to, to be able to play again in OS X. Will there be any other tweaks other than Carbonization?

I'll have to look again, but the most significant things I can remember are:

Some parts of the soundtrack sound a little off, like they're faded or missing notes. Also, certain tracks won't play at all, including Tracks 2, 3, and possibly 7. Essentialy, the appropriate tracks won't play, every time I enter a settlement, but Castle Exodus is unconfirmed. This happens when I play U3 in both OS9 and OSX. My wild uneducated guess is, that something could be wrong with the MOD Plug...

If any of the other users can confirm this problem, will this issue be dealt with in the next update as well? As it is, I keep the music turned off 100% of the time, now.

Another thing I've noticed, the time flow inside any of the dungeons is insanely fast. Like 4 to 7x faster then what it should be (just walking around and standing still), though I don't think it effects combat. You could stand still, and have somewhere around six to twelve turns pass in less then thirty seconds. At least it appeared that way. Because of this, venturing into the dungeons is an extremely hateful experience. I actually used to like trekking into those dungeons.

Will this also possibly be taken care of as well?

Sorry to whine, if this isn't such a problem to anyone else. I really appreaciated the soundtrack, and some of the more interesting dungeon crawling that U3 provides. If you, or anyone else would look into this, I'd be very grateful.

Cydonius wrote:
Some parts of the soundtrack sound a little off, like they're faded or missing notes. Also, certain tracks won't play at all, including Tracks 2, 3, and possibly 7. Essentialy, the appropriate tracks won't play, every time I enter a settlement, but Castle Exodus is unconfirmed. This happens when I play U3 in both OS9 and OSX. My wild uneducated guess is, that something could be wrong with the MOD Plug...

Another thing I've noticed, the time flow inside any of the dungeons is insanely fast. Like 4 to 7x faster then what it should be (just walking around and standing still), though I don't think it effects combat. You could stand still, and have somewhere around six to twelve turns pass in less then thirty seconds. At least it appeared that way. Because of this, venturing into the dungeons is an extremely hateful experience. I actually used to like trekking into those dungeons.

I'm currently unable to play to test these issues out, and don't recall noticing the music issue before (but I didn't remember the songs or there placements perfectly, I'm sure), but the dungeon speed thing sounds familiar (although I don't recall it causing for an extremely hateful experience -- why is it that way for you?). If these are general issues, I too hope that they are fixed at some point. But I don't want to delay an OS X native version to play in the meantime!

spinavision wrote: I'm currently unable to play to test these issues out, and don't recall noticing the music issue before (but I didn't remember the songs or there placements perfectly, I'm sure), but the dungeon speed thing sounds familiar (although I don't recall it causing for an extremely hateful experience -- why is it that way for you?).

Well, it's really not THAT hateful. It's just not too fun, having to try and out pace the dungeon's accelerate time rate, before it screws you over too badly. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed some of the dungeon crawls... But not when I have to go through torches, trying not to hit traps, maintaining directional awareness, attempting to avoid the more unpleasant indigenous inhabitants (Balrons, Dragons, and Snatchs) with a low level party, just surviving below the 5th sub floor with said low level party, while the time in the dungeon passes almost at the speed of light. Otherwise, if it wasn't so fast, I wouldn't have a problem with some of the more tricky aspects of U3's dungeon crawling.

As you are probably well aware, dungeon crawls in this game need a little bit of precision care. With the way that time accelerates in those dungeons, right now, I usually end up stumbling around too much, costing myself some precious turns for surviving and completing objectives in the deeper levels of the dungeons. Whenever it get's to that point, I'm in over my head by then. Sometimes if I'm lucky, it just ammounts to being an irritation.

As I stated in my previous post, U3's dungeon crawls can be a blast. Except for this newly occuring time warping.

spinavision wrote:If these are general issues, I too hope that they are fixed at some point. But I don't want to delay an OS X native version to play in the meantime!

Actually, I can completely agree with you on this. These issues were just something that had me concerned for some time, and I just wanted to point them out to anyone else who might have noticed them as well.

I'm guessing that when U3 is carbonized, these problems will be eliminated anyway, via general bug fixes that might go along with the carbonization process. I doubt we'll have anything to be worried about, by then.

Cydonius wrote:I've noticed a problem with the music in the lastest version.

Me too ... there were a number of sporadic problems with the .mod audio playing system. For the upcoming carbonized Ultima III, I've dropped .mod format and now use audio-only quicktime movies (currently quicktime-wrapped .mid files, but one could drop in quicktime-wrapped .mp3 files instead, for example). The music sounds different (mostly better I think) this way, in addition to fixing the problems you've pointed out.

Cydonius wrote:Another thing I've noticed, the time flow inside any of the dungeons is insanely fast

I'm thinking that I discovered this and fixed it since 1.4.3, but I'll double check.

spinavision wrote:Will it work with GIFs or PNGs or some other lossless compression format, as well? JPEGs produce artifacts that make them less than ideal for icons, tiles, etc.

Looking at my code, it would appear that any image format that QuickTime supports will be fine, including PICT, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG.

spinavision wrote:Will the "Classic" mode as well, for nostalga's sake?

beastie wrote:Me too ... there were a number of sporadic problems with the .mod audio playing system. For the upcoming carbonized Ultima III, I've dropped .mod format and now use audio-only quicktime movies (currently quicktime-wrapped .mid files, but one could drop in quicktime-wrapped .mp3 files instead, for example). The music sounds different (mostly better I think) this way, in addition to fixing the problems you've pointed out.

Hey, thanks for confirming this issue! It's good to know that I'm not the only one noticing this problem. I think that's a good decision, to drop the .mod format, and replacing it with an audio-only quicktime system. I'm sure it will be a hell of a lot more stable. Can't wait to hear it, myself.

beastie wrote:I'm thinking that I discovered this and fixed it since 1.4.3, but I'll double check.

I was wondering if there was any update on when work will continue on the OS X native version of Ultima III. I know you wanted to get MPFreaker out of beta first. How far away is that? My apologies for being impatient, but it's been over half a year since the last post in this topic and I thought I'd both check in and also remind that there is strong interest in this update. Thanks!

beastie wrote:MPFreaker has been ready for 1.0 for quite a while now, I have just overwhelmed with other things. I do intend to get back in the saddle soonly.

Leon

That's great news (about MPFreaker). I completely understand your situation. I am working on an open source (GPL) Ultima I remake in Java. I've gotten really far with it (it's playable, but missing some important things), but I haven't gotten anywhere near as far as I would have hoped because of the product that I'm working on for pay, too.

I'm a new Mac owner who is also interested in the Carbonized version. It seems to run in Classic, but I can't access any of the "invisible" menus! The screen flashes for a moment, but no menu becomes visible, so there's no clean way for me to quit that I know of.

Even without this problem, I'd much perfer a native version. I see that MPFreaker is out of beta, so hopefully that's a sign that the new version is coming soon!